Mack re NPR

Thanks to Mac for letting me post this.

 

You'll Never Hear This on NPR

In an unsettled time when some discount stores will sell a customer only 100 pounds of rice a week (Oh, no!  How will we survive the coming winter?), one is strangely comforted by the eternal 1968-ness of National Public Radio.  Here are some observations that will never be heard on NPR:

 

We've polled everyone who works for the station, and no one here knows what "Hegelian dialectic" means.

 

Food prices are skyrocketing, huh?  Does this mean we have to scratch our files of stories about greedy, overweight Americans?

 

We really are being just a little too, too precious by bragging about how we don't have advertising but then really do have advertising anyway, and then spend hours and hours of air time begging for money because we don't have advertising.  We also receive hundreds of millions of your dollars in tax support every year, and voluntary donations are tax-deductible.  This message is sponsored by the Calvin and Ethel Plonk Foundation for a Greener and More Diverse Recycled America.

 

Have you noticed how cleverly we phased out global warming in favor of climate change?  Clearly the planet, which has been cooling and warming in cycles for millions of years, is little influenced by your lawnmower.  However, if today there is rain and tomorrow there is sunshine we can call it climate change and still blame it on your lawnmower.  Climate change – formerly known as weather.

 

Today on All Things Considered we're not going to feature a single story about some lazy oaf in New Orleans who can't be bothered to clean up his own front yard while whining about how the rest of you aren't sending him enough money.

 

Following All Things Considered we'll have Car Talk and then Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, known to radio professionals as dead-air time.

 

And now an interview with AlleeSHEyah von O'Hara y Gomez d'Raheem, the daughter of a Chinese-Irish father and a Spanish-Moroccan mother whose parents were persecuted everywhere else and who then came to America and received lots of freebies but were snubbed by a grocery-store carryout which is why AlleeSHEyah hates America and wrote an award-winning book of I, I, I, me, me, me poetry that doesn't scan detailing her existential angst. And, honestly, her book stinks. 

 

In the next hour we'll feature an award-winning musician, Friedrich "Stubby" Hamncheese who plays fusion Afro-German-Suomi on an Indian sitar hand-made by unemployed Sherpa draft evaders in Toronto, and, really, that doesn't make any sense at all.

 

You people need to get real about fair-trade coffee.  If some grocery chain re-labels a can of coffee with pictures of happy Colombians holding hands and dancing barefoot in the rain forest, and charges you two more dollars for it, are you stupid or something?

 

We use words like existential, ethnic, fusion, diversity, and fair-trade a great deal because that makes us sound, like, you know, smart and stuff.

 

And now, commentary by grumpy old Daniel Schorr, who disapproves of everyone.

 

In the end, we at NPR are just a bunch of otherwise unemployable white liberal arts graduates who play old records and subtly sneer at people who have real jobs and love America.  We even think Al Franken is an intellectual. So why would you send us money?

 

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Prom night -- tattoos, cell 'phones, and rented clothing. Why?

Humans – Chock Full of Vitamins and Other Essential Nutrients

Thanks to Mac for letting me post this!

Humans – Chock Full of Vitamins and Other Essential Nutrients

In Hawaii a tiger took a walk on the mild side last week, escaping its catdominium and strolling around the human parts of the zoo, checking out the sights, maybe taking a few snapshots, and looking for a snack.

This follows another escape by a tiger in a San Francisco zoo on Christmas Day, a back-to-nature event in which one man was killed near a snack bar. One imagines the survivors running and screaming in fear while text-messaging on their cell 'phones and chugging bottled water.

And then the souvenirs: "I Survived the San Francisco Tiger Massacre" and "My Parents Watched a Guy Get Eaten by a Tiger and All I Got Was This Lousy tee-shirt."

Many people question how big cats can escape their enclosure, but the real question should be why cats bother to do so. In the zoo tigers spend their days lying around in the sun while being given free medical care, free housing, and free food according to their dietary wants and needs, and occasionally eating some of their benefactors. Give them a holy book they can't even read and their lives would be pretty much complete. The reader may now deconstruct the metaphor for himself.

Hundreds of television viewers hundred of miles from any zoo are probably filing disability claims, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome involving nightcats, and thus unable to work. O Lord, send Thy grief counselors among us.

What, exactly, is a grief counselor? Is that what we used to call a busy-body?

The smart tiger will lurk at the updated watering hole, the bottled-water machine, waiting for its thirsty prey.

Unfortunately, PETA members are out of their cages too, terribly concerned lest Fluffy suffer from a human femur caught in his throat.

A house-cat is a tiger writ small, insolent and carnivorous, lounging on the windowsill and dreaming of killing mice and birds, and through its heavy-lidded eyes perhaps measuring its human companion and pondering the nutritive possibilities. To a pussycat the living room is the African veldt, and the cat's pet human little more than a large, munchable monkey with opposable thumbs.

Sure your kitty purrs when you stroke his chin; he's fantasizing about eating you.

Human – it's what's for dinner.

Even harmless-looking animals on the loose are dangerous; an innocent zoo visitor could be trampled to death by sheep stampeding to some presidential candidate's rally.

And then the snakes – they might escape to become editors at The New York Times, swallowing whole the few remaining specimens of another endangered species, real reporters.

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Let's see -- our electoral choices are:

1. Mrs. Macbeth and her geezer-thug-lecher baggage.
2. The Messiah-Fuhrer and his Fuhrer-ess.
3. Another middle-aged guy from Hope, Arkansas who waves a big ol' Bible around, thinks he's a musician, and eats squirrels.
4. The war hero who in his old age is one medication error away from screaming obscenities at the furniture, said furniture including his embalmed wife.

Um...no.

---

Delicious ideas to please the pickiest eaters. Watch the video on AOL Living.

Mack: L'Affaire Bagdad

Thanks to Mac Hall for letting me publish this commentary.

 

 

L'Affaire Bagdad

 

"I shall have to delay you for a few minutes.  You see the Legation is only just open and we have not yet got our full equipment.  We are expecting the rubber stamp any minute now."

 

-- A diplomat in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop

 

The American diplomatic corps, the envy of the world of pallid wine and crumbly cheese, is afraid to go to Bagdad – so afraid that no one is volunteering, and diplomats may have to be dragged out of cocktail parties in Ottawa and the racing season at Epson Downs and ordered to report to The Cradle of Civilization.

 

Working Americans whose taxes support civil servants can certainly understand the reluctance of diplomats to serve civility in Bagdad.  What towboat captain or steelworker cannot appreciate the difficulty in finding a really good tailor in Port Said Street?  And, after all, embassy soirees in Bagdad are more likely to be explosive rather than sparkling, and the paucity of wine merchants is appalling, simply appalling.  Worse, the shopping along Muthana Al Shaiban Street is simply not up to Paris standards, m'dear.  Picnicking along the Tigris is quite impossible given the heat, and trying to punt through the bobbing, malodorous corpses is so, so tiresome.

 

A with-it diplomat in Bagdad can only resent the sad reality that so many of his personal bodyguards are not Harvard or Yale, and don't appreciate amusing anecdotes about yachting with Walter Cronkite off Martha's Vineyard and tittering about people who actually have jobs and love America.

 

And then there are the Christian priests in Iraq.  In New England, anyone who's anyone keeps a tame bishop or two for amusement.  In Iraq, though, priests and bishops are not much fun at parties, didn't go to the right schools, and suffer a tendency to be martyred by the sort of people American bishops like to be palsy with for the cameras.  Yawn.

 

Doesn't anyone understand that stern diplomatic notes can be exchanged just as easily after one's afternoon nap in Brussels as well as after one's afternoon nap in Iraq?  And the embassy in Brussels is so convenient to the theatre.

 

And then there's the bother of domestic staff in Bagdad.  When interviewing and hiring a suitable kitchen staff (soooooooo exhausting), one must check references very carefully so that one does not hire a pastry chef who might bring explosives into the morning room.  The maids, the housekeeper, the porters, the gardeners – can one find staff up to scratch in Iraq?  Yes, a life of public service is terribly demanding.

 

Entertaining can be quite a bother too.  In Europe one knows that a grand duke l'orange takes precedent over a charge' du flatus, but how does one seat a Sunny mahdi and a Shirty sheik at dinner without causing a row?  Gracious!  And what is the proper dress for receptions during a rocket attack – black-tie body armor or white-tie body armor?

 

And must those beastly American soldiers get blown up in the street outside the embassy?  Can't they go out to the countryside and get blown up there?  An American diplomat needs his sleep, after all, and having all those persons from the flyover states fighting and dying just outside is so unseemly.

 

The American diplomatic service – always a step and six feet of reinforced concrete behind our fighting men and women.  Why should they have to serve in Bagdad – or anywhere else?

 

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The glory of modern people is that they really do feel. Their only danger is that they cannot think.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Madonna, the Yenta Ouijazilla

Thanks to Mac Hall for letting me publish this.

Poor Israel – surrounded by genocidal neighbors who stay up late polishing their North Korean nukes and listening to The Voices. And now, perhaps a worse threat, a Kabbalah convention in Tel Aviv featuring Madonna.

Greek Orthodox everywhere breathe a grateful sigh of relief that Madonna’s parents did not name her Theotokos.

Whatever the Kabbalah is – and to ask for a definition is to suffer a smothering tribble-drop of New Age cliches’ – it has become the newest fashion among rich people without underwear. Scientology is, like, soooo last week.

And, really, one can understand – wearing a red string on one’s wrist is so much more understated than lugging an e-meter around.

And what’s with the red string, named Red String? Well, you buy it for some twenty-six dollars or so, and it has, like, y’know, seven knots in it, and, like, stuff, and it wards off the Evil Eye.

Whew! Gotta get me one! I don’t know of a day in my life when I haven’t been menaced by evil eyes glaring at me from my toothbrush and my toaster, and now my salvation is here, in a red string! You can buy your own Red String at Kabbalah.com, along with incense, candles, posters – golly, the sixties are back!

Other followers of Kabbalism are said to include Britney Spears, David and Victoria Beckham, Roseanne Barr, Donna Karan, Lindsey Lohan, Sandra Bernhard, Demi Moore, and Ashton Kutcher, all the greats.

Last week Madonna, who has taken the name of Esther, was a guest of Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who, according to the Associated Press, gave her a copy of the Old Testament. Note to AP: That’s not what they call it in Israel. In return, Madonna gave Mr. Peres a copy of a Kabbalist text, The Book of Splendor, inscribed "To Shimon Peres, the man I admire and love, Madonna." Now that, not dictators with nuclear weapons, will have the man waking up at 0200 dripping sweat and screaming in fear.

Why is it that the rich and famous seem genetically unable to sit modestly and humbly in a pew, donate to the soup kitchen, help serve coffee after divine services, and just shut up?

Because duty is not nearly as thrilling as being part of an in-group: all the corpse-littered films and the secret -– so secret that they have their own web sites – societies puttering about with secret Egyptian / Babylonian / Chaldean / Crusader books, candles, magic healing water, sacred vessels (stamped “Made in Taiwan” on the bottom), codes (Da Vinci and otherwise), arcane ceremonies featuring robes and wands and stuff, Grail legends, Templar legends, crystals, rocks, ouija boards, seances, tarot cards – it’s all old news. Have we learned nothing from Chaucer’s Pardoner with his pig bones and handkerchiefs? Or from pompously sad Yeats with his table-thumping seances and his orange magic robes?

Poor Madonna. If she really wants to encounter Jewish mysticism she could not do better than to visit an ordinary synagogue on a Friday evening. She could sit next to a woman whose husband has died and whose children are grown and gone. She could ask this woman, a real Esther, “What is the meaning of life?” And perhaps Esther would smile with the wisdom of genuine suffering, and whisper “Shhhhh,” and point to the Torah.

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Mack: The Photocopier Squeals

This kind of relates to my last 2 posts about the end of summer and the returning to school for the kind.  My many thanks to Mac Hall for letting me post this. 

 

 

The Office Photocopier Squeals

 

The office photocopier can be a marvelous source of wisdom as well as of trivia. Sometimes one clears the scanner glass and learns what joys and revelations a fellowship / church / ministry / outreach / under the inspired leadership of Reverend Doctor Bishop Brother So-and-So has planned for the next Sunday.

 

Our lesson for today, however, is taken from a science quiz, the original of which was left in The Machine that knows all.  Here are some of the many connected bits of knowledge our tenth-graders are expected to master systematically: 

 

What substance releases hydroxide ions in solution?

 

What category of elements makes up Group 2 in the Periodic Table?

 

What are single-celled prokaryotes, organisms that lack a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles?

 

Define abiotic factors.

 

What is the biological mass in an ecosystem called?

 

What is a form of asexual reproduction in which the genetic material of the cell is copies and then the cell simply divides in two, forming two identical daughter cells?

 

What chemical substance slows or prevents the growth of bacterial microorganisms?

 

How many thanks do we owe Sister Thus-and-Such for playing the piano…wait…wrong document…

 

I conclude by making my own modest contribution: What is the predominant meter in Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places?"

 

A. Iambic pentameter
B. Trochee
C. Anapest
D. Budapest

 

For us parents the most important question in September is this: do our children have a set place and time for study?  Is their need to work to improve themselves respected by all in the household?  Do they have a quiet corner and good sturdy table at which to work?  A desk lamp?  Pens and pencils and calculator and paper?  A few basic reference books, beginning with an ordinary dictionary?

 

After all, life is not entirely about drunken movie starlets named after geographical features.

 

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I would never wear someone else's name or likeness on my clothing, even if I weren't the man I admire most.

--
RMSTringer
+++++++++++++++

Mack's New Computer

Thanks to Mac Hall for letting me publish this on my blog.

The Beast 666 Computer

In the 1970s there were many whispered rumors about The Beast 666 Computer that Satan was supposedly constructing in Belgium. Our social security numbers were the Mark of the Beast (I used to date her, by the way), and these would be fed into the 666 Computer and then fluoridated or something, and then Satan would rule the world, mwahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa!

The founders of this rumor went on to invent Y2K, and urged us all to buy drums of water and sacks of dried peas because when the End Times come and Captain Kirk beams us up to his space ship as the planet explodes we'll all need drums of water and sacks of dried peas.

We now know that the whole bit about Satan and his magic laptop was always quite impossible, since within minutes of its completion the computer would have whimsically shut down and refused to do anything but light up.

Satan would have had to call out a Volkswagen-driving 30-something with thick glasses at $60 an hour to sneer at Satan's outdated hard-drive ("this is sooooooooo last week") and his dial-up connection.

Satan would also have learned that all the dossiers saved on his previous (hardly old) computer in Micro-Blop X-PMS are not compatible with the newer-than-new Micro-Snort Z-Xtreem bundled into his new computer, and would have to sacrifice his first-born, Vladimir Putin, to the computer gods to pay for a patch, which would take three hours to work through each time he wanted to look at, say, his MeMeMeSpace downloads.

Imagine, if you will, buying a new car, and after driving it ten minutes it breaks down, and must be rebuilt at great expense.

Imagine, if you will, buying a new book shelf, and as you transfer those favorite volumes from the old shelf to the new shelf your books simply disappear.

Imagine, if you will, transferring file folders from an old cabinet to a new, and they simply won't fit into either file cabinet.

Imagine, if you will, writing a letter to a friend, and the old pen won't work and the new pen comes with a lengthy instruction manual and then won't work anyway.

Imagine, if you will, writing out your week's work and meeting schedule in your daily planner, and then at a critical moment all your writing simply evaporates.

Imagine, if you will, mailing a letter to a friend, and finding that the postal service no longer accepts envelopes but instead requires a complex new packaging and you must spend a day at a seminar learning this new method.

Yes, I bought a new computer this week.

Satan's in the computer business, all right.

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The Catholic Sun

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There's always laughter and good red wine.
At least I've always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

-- Hilaire Belloc

Mack's Survival School...

Mack Hall is a friend of mine, more than that, he was a school teacher of mine in 6th and 7th grades in Kirbyville Texas. This article is reprinted with his premission. He writes a column in the Jasper News Boy and The Beaumont Enterprise news papers.


Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Mack's Survival School

Last summer a fellow from New Jersey paid a survival school $3,175 to force-march, humiliate, starve, dehydrate, and kill him in a Utah desert. The school says they push folks "past those false limits your mind has set for your body."

Well, yes, dead is pretty much past any limits, false or otherwise.

This is from the school's 'net site:

Your destination on a BOSS Field Course is not a physical place; it can't be plotted on a topo map. Somewhere along the many miles of sagebrush flats, red rock canyons, and mesa tops of Southern Utah — somewhere between the thirst, the hunger and the sweat — you'll discover the real destination: yourself. (http://www.boss-inc.com/02front.html)

You'll surely want to travel a few thousand miles and pay a few thousand dollars to put your life in the hands of someone who writes turgid sell-o-babble like that.

A quick browse through the 'puter will dig up dozens of survival (if you survive) schools, each with its catalogue of cliches' appealing to the sort of geek who lives in a basement with his collection of shirtless-guys-wearing-headbands movies.

One school even advertises lessons on how to kill a sheep with a knife, a life-skill we've all desperately wanted to learn in case America is invaded by extremist ewes with blood-lust in their eyes and death on their little hooves.

There are entirely too many, um, men who suffer the pathetic need to join an organization where they will be bullied and humiliated, and where they can do secret handshakes and call each other Brother and Comrade. If your son wants to join a fraternity, ask him why he wants to pay money to some other idiots to strip him naked and beat him up so they'll be his friends.

But I have my own fantasy of a personal training school, one that can whup me into the shape I want. Indeed, I have sketched out a rudimentary curriculum for Mack's Survival School:

1. Sleep deprivation exercise: whenever the alarm sounds off in the morning a crack squad of ninja clock-assassins wearing discount-store camouflage knee-pants made in China will garrot it into silence with a length of piano wire so that you can sleep another hour or two. After all, what's really important in life: food, clothing, and shelter, or self-fulfilment, and, like, oneness with nature and stuff, pushing your personal envelope where no envelope has gone before?

2. Preparing clear fields-of-fire: whenever the yard needs mowing, your comrades will chant "No, it doesn't! No, it doesn't!" over and over, and will flash seductive pictures of reclining chairs before your weary eyes.

3. Man as hunter: intensive sessions on studying menus. Hey, if God meant for you to run down a sheep and cut its throat, He would not have invented restaurants.

4. Finding water in the desert: intensive preparation and practical exercises in asking wait-staff for a glass of water. Advanced course: turning the water-faucet the right way.

5. Staying dry in a thunderstorm: stay in the house.

6. Sleeping dry in a thunderstorm: go to bed. In the house.

7. Protection against predators, human and animal: lock the door. Sleep with a revolver by the bed. Memorize the secret code for 911.

8. Crossing the desert: drive your car.

9. Finding your way across country: stay on the road. Duh.

10. Signalling to your comrades: dial the telephone.

11. Primitive shelters: just wait for the next hurricane and score yourself a blue FEMA tarp.

12. Route hiking: from the couch to the refrigerator and back.

13. Discovering who you really are: look in the mirror.

14. Building a fire: strike a match.

15. Making a difference in the world: go get a job.

Now, then, folks, you'll find yourself and you will survive my course. Now just send me the money.




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